Web Hosting

Once your site is ready to be put online, you’ll need to choose one of the many web hosting companies that will store your website files and serve your pages to your visitors. Some hosting companies will offer webspace, domain names, visitor statistics and more — but there’s a lot to choose from. In this section we compare hundreds of hosting options so that you can choose the best one for you.

Know what you need

There are many, many companies offering web hosting, and it can be difficult to compare them all without doing a lot of comparison shopping. The first step to making a good decision on this is to know exactly what your site is going to need.

Your hosting needs will depend on what type of site you’re building. If you’re hosting a personal site you can probably get away with cheap or even free hosting. If you expect a lot of traffic to your site, you should look at hosts that offer plenty of bandwidth.

Ross’ Recommendations

Currently, the best deal I can see is to use Dreamhost. I’ve organised a bargain for HTML Source readers too — use the coupon code “HTMLSOURCE” to save $50 on your hosting, and get your first domain name free. Personally, I’ve used
pair Networks to host HTML Source (on the “Webmaster” plan), for the last six years and have never had an issue with them. Use the coupon code “REFUGEE” with them and they‘ll waive your initial setup fees.

Both of those companies are excellent, but there’s lots of other choices, so have a look below at our comparison tables for hundreds of web hosts if you like. As you can see, they differ in many different ways. Visit a host by clicking their name. You can narrow down the list using the links below and the filters on the table.

Compare Hosting Plans

Narrow down your search

Extremely high-traffic sites will probably justify signing up for dedicated hosting, which means you have an entire machine dedicated to your site, but unless you’re getting hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, this is probably unnecessary. E-commerce sites might need a shopping cart set up. Once you know what you need, dive in and start looking at some of the hosts listed below.